It seemed a likely place to find a good news story. With the fall of Kabul, Mazar was now the only town of any size not under Taliban control, and the de facto headquarters of the new Northern Alliance – a shaky coalition of Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara Shi’ite militias who had failed individually to resist the southerners’ advance. I made my way by bus to the local headquarters of Oxfam, a small compound just west of the city centre that rented a few rooms to itinerant journalists like me. The previous year I had written a commentary piece for the London Independent entitled ‘The Peace Brought by the Taliban’. This was largely an exercise in devil’s advocacy, although it had a serious point: it seemed to me that the West’s righteous fist-shaking at the Taliban’s treatment of women was in danger of obscuring the positive side of the new regime, particularly the benefits of improved security. The article quoted Care International’s Stuart Worsley at some length.
